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mattyrm wrote: Oh, and in winter conservative kids build snowmen, labour kids build black disabled snow lesbians. :-)

Lulz, feth off.
tory kids stay indoors due to the weight of their floppy fringes and their sickly constitution and direct poor socialist kids to build their snowmen for them via megaphones... Till the socialist kids wake up to outnumbering the tory kids and being far stronger, kick down the doors and take the country pile for themselves and turn it into a shared living space for everyone who contributes!!

I didn't realise they had that many votes. It is probably the reason the lib dems have been campaigning to change the voting system so that it is direct votes that count, rather than seats

SilverMK2 wrote:I didn't realise they had that many votes. It is probably the reason the lib dems have been campaigning to change the voting system so that it is direct votes that count, rather than seats

Precisely - it's a drum the Lib Dem's have been banging for years. And the reverse of the argument is the reason that Tories traditionally are opposed to Proportional Representation; because they would more than likely end up with less seats than they win. A large part of our current system is more to do with where large blocks of voters live rather than total votes cast.

Ah well, soon the zombies will come and it will not matter who is in power (unless it is the "Pro-Zombie party for the chaining of all people in a zombie filled pit Party"

We need voting reform

Indeed we do. We also need shot of fething Scotland.

Like most of the things that might be worth considering changing maybe, you can be sure the change is worse than the original condition.

Lib Dems, sure there are a fair few of them, but never enough it seems. Tough, thats democracy. So they want proportional representation, why, because it helps the poluace, no because it helps themselves.

In our system you vote for a local candidate, not a regional set of lists. Your local MOP is your local representative, if you dont like them and cant win with the guy you want, vote tactically.

With a regional list system constituencies are larger and have multiple MP's, the votes are divided by percentage and MP's are allocated accordingly. So if you had say 10 MP's for a region and Labout got all the votes , they get 10 MP's. More likely we ghet a 4/3/3 split all the time.

Sounds fair. No it isnt. You can get rid of an MP you dont like by tactically voting, in a listed system if you have an oily scum unfit for office, and there are a fair few of those then if due to back talking and having oily friends in oily places that scum is the number one choice for the party concerned then unless you practically annihilate that parties showing in the ballots you are unlikely to ever be rid of him.

Martin Bell was able to get out a partuicularly odious tory MP in 1997 because Labour and Lid Dems both withdrew their cndidates in support of him. In a lists system that would not be enough, if the unwanted candidate was high enough up the parties list.

Then you add a new problem. What happens to the odd percentages. 10 MP's and a percentage vote gives 1 MP per 10% votes polled.

Say the three main parties tally enough to take three candidates each with rough change of percentages. What happens next, you get essentially the same as the disadvantage of the current system, first part the post wirth other voting blocks. Only you get it a whole lot worse, independents will cease to exist, so bang goes your only chance of a truly local MP.

Now you can 'fix' this proble my making the listing larger and thus splitting down the percentages further, you can also 'fix the propblem of nopt having local representatives by appointing them from amongst MP'sd elected in the same way Ministerrs are given cabinet positions. The trouble is you get less democracy not more.

If you have regional lists you get your 'local MP in the nerarest big conurbation, urbanised politics. Rural voters and then marginalised and roundly ignored.

To make matters worse given large enough lists fring parties will get MP's elected. Sure it is genuinely fasir as far as proportional representationis concerned, but once the seats are allocated and people get their regional representative then paerties with voting blocks of 400k to 1M voters will finsd a seat or two. Someone has got to draw the short straw and have Nick Griffin as their elected representative, even if noone in the region he represents wanted him.


Liberal Democrats call out for proportional representation because it HELPS THEM. It has nothing to do with whether it helps the populace, its 100% self interest.
Our system is one of the betters ones and so long as the rules are followed it is no less unfair than PR, after all if the Lib-Dems are first past the post, they win.

I live in a labour strong hold, If they put donald duck up as candidate he'd win. so if I vote anything other than labour whats the point. So you tell me why is your vote more important than mine. We need a new system of voting

SilverMK2 wrote:Ah well, soon the zombies will come and it will not matter who is in power (unless it is the "Pro-Zombie party for the chaining of all people in a zombie filled pit Party"

Funny thing is: there is (or was) a party standing for Brighton Pavillion, (which just happens to be full of students and jedi knights (it contained the most in the last census)) called 'the undead rights and equality party' or something along those lines.

And you thought you were being silly...

On a more serious note, i'm suprised at how accurate the exit poll turned out to be, and also the complete faliure of the liberals to get a greater number of seats than last time. The fact that they were coming 2nd in most polls going up to election night and the fact they got over 6 million votes really brings home how damaged their chances are due to the current voting system. I can see now why they want proportional representation: they're just too spread out. However, this does all mean that Clegg has become one of the most influential men in the country right now, and the tories and labour will most likely be fawning all over him and fighting over who gets to tie his shoelaces in return for support to form a coalition government.

I am still amazed at how many labour votes there were... surely those voters must have been voting for the local candidate, not for Gordon 'I'll keep on spending' Brown?

IMO we could solve the issues of proportional representation and the House of Lords by converting the second chamber to a proportionally elected system.

There would have to be constitutional reform to define the powers of Parliament as a whole. ATM the Lords are allowed to send back bills but the Commons are allowed to force them through if they are to do with finance. Clearly that should be changed if the upper house is elected.

If only the Tories had Creed, then they could outflank Cameron into no. 10

Brown: *Vaguely coherent mumbling to the effect of "Haha, no one can get to me in my house where the door only opens from the inside!"*

-A slight displacement of air-

Brown: *Slightly more urgent jowely gibbering to the effect of "Cameron?! How did you get in here? It would take a tactical gen... CREEEEEEEED!"*

Surely you mean a political geniu... CLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEG!

He's the only man with the power to outflank people into no. 10 right now.

Haha!

Most excellent.

Thanks.

Here's a bombshell for you, Gordon Brown quit 5 minutes ago.

No link yet AFAICT, but I will keep searching.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Scratch that, it was at 5 past 5.

Gordon Brown wrote: I have no desire to stay in my position longer than is needed to ensure that the path to economic growth is secured"

He is staying PM for now, and Clegg will begin talks with the Labour party soon.

Nick Robinson wrote:Mr Brown's decision to resign was designed to "unlock" a possible coalition deal between Labour and the Lib Dems

Live Coverage here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/liveevent/


Automatically Appended Next Post:
In fact, can the Thread Title be changed to 'UK Politics Thread' ?

So is it true that the guy/party who received the most votes is about to NOT be elected? Sounds like a Chicago style election to me.

How does that work?

Ok, before I launch into a detailed explanation of the British Voting system, how clued up are you on it already?

ONly partially. I sort of understand that you're voting for MPs and not the specific person, sort of like voting for COngress and Congress then chooses a President

Ok, here goes then:

To win an election in Britain, a political party needs to win more than half the total number of seats in the house of commons in the country, thus giving them an overall majority, and permission from Her Majesty to form a government. Each seat represents a constituency.

There are 650 Constituencies in total, each with roughly 30-40k people living in them. This means that the winning party would need 326 seats to have an overall majority. To win a seat, an MP needs to get more votes than anyone else.

What has happened this election is that the conservatives have only won 306 seats, with 10 million votes. Labour has 258, and the Liberal Democrats have 57, with roughly 8 million and 6 million votes respectively. The rest of the seats voted for one of the other parties (eg, the Green Party or the Scottish National Party, who are in no way affiliated with the BNP).

This means you have a situation known as a Hung Parliment, where no party has an overall majority. This means Gordon Brown got to stay in power until the parties can sort something out by forming coalitions with one another until one coalition has more than half the total seats. Whichever parties formed that coalition get to form a Coalition Government, where members of the Cabinet (sort of like a high council) come from more than one party. This means that Labour could technically form a coalition with the Liberals, meaning Labour (and therefor Gordon Brown) stays in power, as they had more seats than the Lib-Dems.

Now Gordon Brown has announced he will step down, Labour will elect a new leader, who will continue talks with the Liberals after he (or she) has been elected from among their number.

Interesting. In most races here where there are multiple candidates and there is a minimum, typically the top two candidates have a follow on runoff election. other types have whoever has the most votes or electors (national) wins.

What if the Queen says "sod off!"? If I were Qu, er King I'd say "Sod off!" just because I could. (If I were Queen I'd be rich of music royalties).

We are the champions, my friends...

The Queen can do a lot of things but generally does whatever the politicians want. She has a lot of power, but I don't think anyone knows what would happen if she ever tried to use it.

Brown's standing down. The largest obstacle to a Lib-Lab controlled alliance has just been removed.

SilverMK2 wrote:The Queen can do a lot of things but generally does whatever the politicians want. She has a lot of power, but I don't think anyone knows what would happen if she ever tried to use it.

Didn't this happen to the last guy?

I'm not entirely sure, as the Monarchy is not all that powerful anymore, even the Queens speech is written by the Government...

I don't think they'd be allowed to, and at a guess, there would presumably be another General Election.

But as I said, I'm not really sure, as she is basically just a figurehead now . *salute

Start putting your money on a Lib / Lab coalition folks. The biggest obstacle to this was Gordon Brown, and now he has been 'removed', the deal is on. Looks like the 3 days talks with the Tories yielded nothing and we are set to end up with a minority government. I don't think the Lib / Lab coalition can scrape together enough seats for a majority - they would need the support of Plaid Cymru, the SNP, Greens and SDLP for a majority.

Welcome to weak and ineffectual government. Expect votes of no confidence and a recalled election with ~6 months.

I hope not - con/lib would be better for everyone.

They can get a Lib-Lab majority, just...

The conservatives have also released a last ditch attempt to get a coalition. They promise 'a referendum on bringing in a different voting system - known as AV'

Copy-Paste from the BBC website:

Alternative Voting:
Voters rank the candidates. If no candidate has 50% of first preferences then second preferences are counted and so on until someone has a majority.

UK use: By-elections to Northern Ireland Assembly. /end copy-paste.

Breaking news is that apparantly the Cabinet have not been talking about potential leadership candidates... Suprisingly, but they all look quite glum leaving No 10.

filbert wrote:Start putting your money on a Lib / Lab coalition folks. The biggest obstacle to this was Gordon Brown, and now he has been 'removed', the deal is on. Looks like the 3 days talks with the Tories yielded nothing and we are set to end up with a minority government. I don't think the Lib / Lab coalition can scrape together enough seats for a majority - they would need the support of Plaid Cymru, the SNP, Greens and SDLP for a majority.

Welcome to weak and ineffectual government. Expect votes of no confidence and a recalled election with ~6 months.

How does that work FB? If the coaltion has the majority votes, would they be the ones to call the vote? It would not be in their interest to call a vote. Who call a vote and what are the conditions?

Ach so confusing. You need a right and proper fixed election with specified terms!

Frazzled wrote:Ach so confusing. You need a right and proper fixed election with specified terms!

We're gonna ship in Jeb Bush for a recount. One, six, fifty-seven, four, twelvety...

The opposition would call for the Vote of no Confidence, then the House of Commons, and (I assume) the house of Lords as well, vote for or against. If the consensus is For, there is another General Election.

I believe they can call for a vote of no confidence at any point, but obviously there would be no point against a strong government.

Dastardly Dave wrote:The opposition would call for the Vote of no Confidence, then the House of Commons, and (I assume) the house of Lords as well, vote for or against. If the consensus is For, there is another General Election.

I believe they can call for a vote of no confidence at any point, but obviously there would be no point against a strong government.

Why would the party in power ever vote "for?"